Page 128 of Shifters Reckoning

Voices of all the other culminations before me rose in the wind. They answered my call.

The dome couldn’t block them out. Because Logan had forced his way through, there was a gap wide enough for my allies to reach me, and they did. They linked with me, fortified me, pushed back against the energy deadlock I still shared with Acheron.

If I can only tip the balance…

Shadow mages flooded the dome, filling it with an inky blackness. Yet none could touch me, my mate, or dim our light. Hollowed-out shifters marched on the gap, coming to the aid of their master.

My bond with Logan flickered, and I flinched. A moment later, Marcus whispered in my head. He told me what I needed to know and what no one else on earth could give. He told me where to look.

Not the cowl. Not the theater. Not the voice that had crooned at my mate across a creek, had hollowed shifters into husks, and had driven my birth mother, exploiting her genetics. I triaged Acheron, the way I’d evaluated Sully-Boy tangled in barbed wire and searched for the wound.

Wind swirled inside the dome. Shadows and multicolored magic filled the vortex. Lightning struck the top of the dome, and thunder shook the boundaries. More cracks formed.

Logan squeezed my hand. It’s time, love.

I faced Acheron, and for the first time, I truly saw him.

On one side, there was corruption. An ancient, patient, bottomless rot, older than the man, older than the name. Foulness had been drowned, dragged up, and taught the dark arts. The undead beast had discovered that the sweetest meal in all the world was a person’s soul in the exact moment love shifts to grief. Centuries of an anguish so total it had gone bad, curdled, learned to feed on more sorrow.

Buried a layer down, there were also the remnants of a man who had forced himself to believe destruction was the only way to save the universe. He had been an anchor. A shifter from almost two hundred years ago. He’d stood exactly where Logan had stood tonight, on the wrong side of a boundary, and had watched his multimorph become the mortar between two worlds, win, and disappear.

Then, he’d done what history had told him to do. He’d held his line. He’d grieved. He’d stood there, hollowed out, with a hole shaped exactly like her. He had become a monster who’d chosen the dark. He had been the end of our story, run out to its full and horrible length. He was still searching for the woman, the fated mate he had lost.

“No! Do not speak of her!” Acheron’s face twisted as though he understood the war inside himself.

Emma. We’re running out of time. Logan’s growl reverberated in my thoughts.

He sent as much murderous rage into his stream of power as he could, and I met it with compassion. Still, his magic and mine were melded together.

The earth shook beneath our feet. Lightning jumped from thunderhead to thunderhead, and clouds boiled in the midnight sky. The Cold Moon disappeared, and shadows draped everything outside.

Magic darted from me to Logan and back again like electricity. It gathered over my chest, ball lightning, dazzling in myriad colors. I raised the orb over my head and prepared to cast it over our heartbroken enemy. He’d loved once…

Emma. Logan’s pleading voice echoed in my head.

But I stopped short of throwing the final attack.

I wasn’t going to kill Acheron.

He’d earned it a thousand times over. There was the casualty list on the desk back in Six-Mile and every soul he’d consumed and changed into a being twisted ugly.

But I was a healer. I had been for my entire life. Even as the multimorph, my mission had been to save by healing rifts between the clans. Destruction was easy, and I didn’t go all the way down to the depths of Wolf Moon Cave to learn how to destroy. Another option had always been my goal.

I was the one who unites. If I controlled anyone, I didn’t burn them, either, not even the worst of them, not if there was a thread of hope still left inside the man.

Lasting victory was never going to be Acheron’s kind. Death begat death and would create the next Acheron for the next multimorph.

Instead, I released my energy and then sent a stream upward into the Veil, grasping the energies of the Veil, and I gasped. Oof.

Acheron dropped to his knees, panting. “Nooo!”

Logan stepped closer. What is it?

Acheron’s corruption touches every knot in the Veil between the worlds, the whole net of shifters’ work. God, he’s trying to pull it apart line by line.

“What are you doing?” Acheron shrieked. He tried to summon a burst of his own power, but it sputtered out.

Kill him, Emma. Put him out of his misery.